Phonic All Star Fun

Welcome to our Phonic All Star Module which is definitely our feature item of the Club Yicketty Yak Program with our full scaled-outrageous puppets and characters…the Phonic All Stars. We have 46 characters that make up the Phonic All Star series of characters which represent each sound of the Australian Phonetic Alphabet.

Well frankly, the alphabet just isn’t enough. When we talk about speech and then later the acquisition of great literacy skills we need to focus on the conclusive set of 46 speech sounds. If we don’t, it is like doing maths without knowing all the numbers.

Our group participants will be learning all 26 consonants and all 22 vowels whilst joining our Club Yak which will form what I call the phoneme or speech sound grid. This is essential as the starting point. Each week and with your home online program they will be learning:

How the speech sounds are created using the parts of speech being our breath, voice, articulators such as our lips, teeth, tongue and soft palate.

Which letter patterns or graphemes are used to represent these speech sounds when we write

A Phonic All Star gesture or hand signal to support them to remember each sound from all the other 45 sounds

How to discriminate or hear the sounds apart from each other as some sounds sound very similar and can be confusing for children

Phonological awareness skills which are fundamental mental skills that are prerequisites for children’s development of literacy skills for reading, spelling and writing. Phonological awareness skills are how we manage sound information in our mind. These are skills such as rhyming, blending sounds, segmenting sounds, manipulating sounds, auditory memory and sequencing of speech sounds.

As part of your Phonic All Star Club Yak Pack you have been provided with lots of goodies to take home and enjoy.

One of these is the first compilation album from the Phonic All Stars … Cruisin’ with the Consonants which is now also available on itunes and CD Baby. Strap the kids into the car and ramp it up load because this CD can handle it! Developed over many years with Big Note Productions on the Gold Coast, Katrine Elliott, Speech Pathologist, took her talents out of the clinic to “jam” with the creative genius of the team at Big Note – Jen-Adrian and Smudge…and of course Minty. The writing of the lyrics, the creation of the stories and the desperate search for words that start with a target letter and to still make it remotely rhyme made the task nothing less that a major project that launched into the album you get to take home. So why don’t you play the game to count how many words begin with that letter (eg. “S” in Sidney Snake’s song) and be on the search for where Katrine has hidden how the speech sound is formed in the lyrics of the song.

Can you be the detective and decipher how the speech sound is made in the lyrics of the soundtrack?

Now we are proud to offer the second album in the series…which I think is seriously better… Carnivale of Sound…now available on cd baby and itunes for you to download.

Each week the Club Yak participants will attend to different skills they are learning and practicing. Once they know their speech sounds, one of these skills is to practice retrieving all the speech sounds fast and accurately.

Below is the week by week low down of what the kids will be learning. Click on the links to get to the details of what the activity was, how to teach this and how to follow up this task at home.

In your Yak Home Travel Pack you can complete your journal log for the tasks that you have undertaken so that you can share this with your Speech Pathologist Group Leader. Write your tasks in the Phonic All Star Fun section. If work is completed your child earns a bonus sticker on their travel map!

In your Yak Pack you have been given the Phonic All Stars Teach me Speech Sounds workbook so that you can independently read through this book with your child and learn about how the speech sounds are created yourself. The workbook gives you a picture of how the hand signal is made to support your child to remember the speech sound.

Follow this link to the teach-me-speech-sounds website whereby you can watch a video teaching about each sound/each letter/Phonic All Star character/ How the speech sound is created/ and some information about the characters wacky story.

The Phonic All Star characters are bigger than life and you just may be surprised how deep this rabbit warren goes in respect to their stories, their music and their capacity to entertain children. Visit their individual pages on the teach me speech sound website to connect further with songs, stories, talking books and learning activities as it is brought to life on line. So why don’t you start with Winona Wind to get you started.